For many years now, the different scandals have made us look a little more for our privacy. Companies like Google or Facebook do not respect it, since they need some of our information for their business model, and it was especially when this came to light that DuckDuckGo rose like foam. And it is that it is a search engine with a different philosophy: they do not save our searches, so they could not use our information even if they wanted to. So we already have a first reason: privacy.
With the above explained, there are a couple of questions to keep in mind: are your search results good? Well, it depends on what we are looking for, yes. In fact, it is said that when we search for Linux information, tutorials and such, DuckDuckGo results are the best, but are less good in other searches. So why use it by default? Because it includes something that they have called ! Bangs, and once you try them you don't want anything else.
DuckDuckGo's best weapon has a name:! Bangs
Although this is not that I have read it anywhere, the name "Bang" seems to come from "Boom", that is, we want something and Boom! there it appears instantly. That's what they exist for. To explain it and make it understood, the ! Bangs They are shortcuts to search or launch tools that the search engine offers us. The best way to understand it is to give some examples:
- ! g: as I will explain later, this may be the most important. Do a Google search.
- ! gi and! bi: search for images on Google and Bing respectively.
- ! gturl and! bturl: if we put it in front of a URL in another language, it translates the page in Google and Bing translate respectively.
- ! yt: Search for videos on YouTube.
- ! wo! wes: search Wikipedia or its Spanish version.
- ! rae: define words.
- ! spotify,! deezer or! tidal: Search Spotify, Deezer, or Tidal. ! applemusic also exists, but it fails and should be reported. In fact, many Apple services fail, and not just DuckDuckGo.
- ! password X: creates a password with the number of characters that we indicate. For example,! Password 12 will create a random password of 12 characters.
- ! gp or! ituneses: search for apps on Google Play or iTunes, but in the second case it was done differently, so that it would search all Apple stores, such as the App Store or iTunes. For this reason, the results appear in the same search engine, and not in an Apple website.
- stopwatch: it throws us a stopwatch.
- ! tw - Search Twitter.
- ! aur: search the Arch User Repository
- ! lauchpad or! lp: Search Launchpad.
- Dozens of options for Linux in this link.
- And hundreds of other! Bangs that you can discover on the main page of the search engine, adding the symbol «!» and starting to write the service in which you need to search, or from this link.
As I have explained in the first example on the list, using DuckDuckGo makes sense, from my point of view, because from it you can search in Google, and from Google you cannot perform searches like DuckDuckGo and their! Bangs. Also, if we fill in a form, we can ask them to add a! Bang to search services that are currently not possible through the duck search engine.
DuckDuckGo and all this from the URL bar
Setting DuckDuckGo by default is not putting it on the home page. Is so that we can search from the url bar, or if we have an online search tool, to search directly from it. And at this point I am perfectly aware that many of you will be thinking that this article is silly or is sponsored, but it is not. It is a personal recommendation, but I know that very few will attend it. Therefore, I am also going to talk about an alternative: create our own shortcuts or launchers.
Logically, it is not the same and with this we will have two problems: only the ones we believe will work and, when we reinstall the browser, depending on which one and if they are not added to the synchronization options, they could disappear. In any case, create our own shortcuts o! Bangs is simple:
Firefox
- We go to a website or service.
- In the search box, we right click.
- We choose «Add a keyword to this search».
- We fill in the information you ask for. One box is for the name that will appear and the other for the keyword or shortcut.
In other browsers, like Vivaldi, is similar, but the option is "Add search engine".
Chromium / Chrome
- We do a search on the service, this is important.
- Let's go to Settings / Search / Manage search engines.
- In «Other search engines» we look for the service.
- We click on the three dots / Edit.
- In the window that appears, we put the shortcut that we want to use in "Keyword" and we accept.
Personally, which I have also gotten used to, I prefer to save all the work and use DuckDuckGo, so I leave the recommendation there.